The technology industry is full of once-great companies that held on to an idea, a product, or a platform too long and ended up eventually falling hopelessly behind their competitors and going out of business or being acquired because of it. Think of DEC, Sun, and Palm.
However, the yin to that yang is when a company doesn’t give a new initiative enough time to run its course and pulls the plug too soon. Google has been guilty of this in 2010. The culprit is not a technology or a platform in this case. Instead, it is Google’s multi-faceted strategy for transforming the US wireless industry. This ambitious scheme — which few companies other than Google would have the influence or resources to pursue — has been aimed at helping US mobile users. It has now been utterly abandoned.
The final indication that Google has given up on this altruistic idea is the Google Nexus S smartphone, which CEO Eric Schmidt essentially confirmed the existence of last week during his interview at the Web 2.0 Summit.
